Oracle offers low overhead cloud services

Oracle Corp. launched what might be called a starter set of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings that would allow agencies to operate some of the company’s mainstream cloud computing systems in-house for a monthly fee.

With Oracle IaaS organizations could obtain and manage the company’s Engineering Systems-class services on their own premises without having to confront the capital costs of acquiring the systems, Oracle said.

Instead, agencies could deploy the systems in their own data centers and behind their firewalls on what amounts to a subscription basis. Juan Loaiza, senior vice president of Oracle Software Development, said Oracle IaaS “makes it possible for customers to use, and pay for, peak processing power only when they need it and get the highest level of support.”The systems include Oracle’s Exadata Database Machine, Exalogic Elastic Cloud, SPARC SuperCluster, Exalytics In-Memory Machine and Sun ZFS Storage Appliance. Oracle Capacity on Demand, which lets customers dial-up processing capacity as needed, is part of the offering.

IaaS generally refers to server, storage, and networking hardware delivered as a service. Oracle said it does not consider the offerings an alternative to big public cloud providers of such services like Amazon Web Services.

Instead it is intended to appeal to organizations on a cash-flow and accounting basis. IaaS is available on a three-year term and can be extended to extra quarters at a lower monthly fee. At the end of the term, organizations would return the systems to Oracle.

Oracle said there are cost advantages for using IaaS over the term, versus the cost of purchasing new hardware. As an example, the company said a traditional acquisition of Oracle Exadata X3-2 Engineered System priced at $1 million would cost $1.36 million over three years when hardware support costs are included.

With Oracle IaaS, the same system would cost $1.08 million if no capacity on demand services were used.